Distributed computer systems typically comprise multiple computers connected to each other by a communication network. Prior art has shown that in a distributed computer system, primary memory on one computer can be used as temporary storage, in place of a disk, for pages displaced from the memory of a different computer. The pages stored in this way may later be fetched from computers storing them, rather than from a disk.
A significant problem in the system described above is how to choose the computers in which to store the data from other computers. Prior art has demonstrated several schemes to choose the computers to store the data. These schemes fall into two categories identified by the terms "Fixed Set" and "Variable Set."